Agriculture biologically derived pesticides

Natural products represent a diversity of chemical compounds with varied biological activities. Natural products are an important source of novel pharmaceuticals as well as agricultural pesticides (1,2). Natural products are derived from a number of pathways that create basic scaffolds that are further modified by various tailoring enzymes to create the wide diversity of structures that exist in nature. Polyketide synthases are responsible for the synthesis of an array of natural products including antibiotics such as erythromycin in bacteria (3) and mycotoxins such as aflatoxin in fungi (4). Furthermore, in plants they are part of the biosynthetic machinery of flavonoids, phytoalexins, and phenolic lipi (5,6). 

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